


The Truth or Something Beautiful

by epersonae, hops



Series: the only life you could save [14]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Life talks, Pocket spa, Post-Canon, avoiding feelings with cucumber sandwiches, these chucklefucks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-07
Updated: 2018-02-07
Packaged: 2019-03-14 21:23:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13598667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epersonae/pseuds/epersonae, https://archiveofourown.org/users/hops/pseuds/hops
Summary: A visit to the pocket spa leads to new realizations for Taako and Lucretia. Featuring the deluxe model, different sandwiches, a couple of drinks, and the question: Trust or Forsake?





	The Truth or Something Beautiful

**Author's Note:**

> Comin' atcha with another hot collab 
> 
> This takes place some time after their last talk in the kitchen/Angus's graduation, so read [Find the One Safe Way](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13238166) (and the other parts of this series, if you please-- it's good and we're proud of it!) first! 
> 
> Title from ["Do You Want The Truth or Something Beautiful"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjWcF1QJx1Y) by Paloma Faith

Taako lets himself into Magnus’s home, bracing himself for the onslaught of dog kisses that await him on the other side of the door. It’s taken some time, but he’s finally come to appreciate even the mutts on his visits to Raven’s Roost. Getting slobbered on is a fair sacrifice for the happiness that Magnus, and the home he’s made here, brings. 

Taako smiles, hesitates for just a moment before pushing the door open. Raven’s Roost is a good place, for a good man. And sometimes, on days like these, it feels like a place for him, too. Not home, but something like it.

Johann comes bounding up and Taako puts his hands out to stop the worst of the jumping and licking. Once the dog is sufficiently petted and Taako’s hands are sticky and furry, he moves to the kitchen and runs them under the sink. 

Taako gazes out the window to the backyard as the sunset yawns into twilight, warm water running over his hands. He stares at something standing tall and block-like in the grass. It looks familiar, and he’s sure he’s — he dries his hands quickly on his pants, checks his pockets, his bag, and no, it’s there — he has his pocket spa. This is a different one. The pocket workshop? 

He furrows his brow and walks out onto the back deck, heels clicking on the wood.  _ Surely _ a pocket spa. 

“Maggie?” he calls, but he knows it’s not Magnus. He’d spoken to him on the stone not too long ago. He walks the few stairs down into the yard and touches the light layers of sheer curtain — different from the beaded one of his own spa — and pulls it aside at arm’s length without looking. 

“Hello?” Taako calls in mock-warning. “I’ll have you know that pocket spa-ing in Raven’s Roost is Taako territory, and you’re encroaching on it, amigo.” 

A familiar low chuckle. “You know they sell these at every Fantasy Costco, right?”

Taako’s heart dips into his stomach for a moment at the sound of her voice. “Creesh?” he asks, then curses himself for giving the impression that he may actually not  _ hate  _ seeing her here, too. He steps into the spa and lets the curtain drop behind him. 

“Yes,” she says, then a pause. “Shit. What time is it? I'm probably supposed to be halfway back by now, if you're here. I'm so sorry. Mags should've come out to get me.” She emerges from the sauna wrapped tightly in a thin cotton robe in dark blue and white. 

He studies her for a moment as she frets. “No big. It’s not exactly a secret.” He laughs, sounding only a little uncomfortable. 

“No of course, I suppose not.” She plays with the corner of the robe tie. “It's simply that, well, I want to make sure you have your own time. You know, that I'm not…. Impinging on anything.” She frowns slightly. “So…. If he's not here, that means he's…ah, the meeting at Hammer and Tails must have run late. He's probably not going to be here for a while. Hmm…. Do you want a cucumber sandwich?” 

“Don’t mind if I do,” he sings, and passes her in pursuit of the perfectly stacked plate of sandwiches by the small pool. “And don’t you worry Lucy, baby, I’ve got all the time I need with Mags.” 

He picks up a triangular piece of a sandwich, takes a bite, and winks. 

For a second, her frown deepens, although more in confusion than anything else. Her eyes narrow. Then she lets out a breath, rolls her shoulders, and takes a sandwich. 

“These are surprisingly good for…. Whatever this is,” she says. “And I'm glad.” 

Taako speaks, still chewing. “For the sandwiches, or...?” A smirk tugs the corner of his lips. 

She takes a bite, chews slowly and thoughtfully before finally speaking. 

“I'm glad it's good with you, with you and Magnus. I know he's happy. And that's…. That's a lot.” She looks down into the water, smiling to herself. 

“Jeezy, coming out the gate with the Fantasy Hallmark moment?” Taako says lightly. His chest feels tight, and he’s not sure why. “What’s up with you?” 

She shrugs. “Nothing, really. Just relaxed. Had a nice day.” She waves the sandwich at the spa's interior. “You know, one gets into an introspective mood after a little lounging about.” Again that chuckle. “Should've bought one of these years ago.” 

Taako chews, nodding as he looks around the room. “It’s alright. Mine has better sandwiches, though. Tuna…” He glances over at her, half-smiling. He stands poolside and starts unbuttoning his shirt. “But I mean, I’m just gonna take a dip anyway, if I’m here?” 

She smiles; he's so clearly pushing at some boundary that she has no interest in enforcing. In any case, it's true that an afternoon of soaking and steaming has rendered her too mellow to care. 

“I'd say ‘my house is your house,’ but since it's technically Magnus’s house…. As long as you don't mind if I join. I could stand to cool down after the sauna.” She sets down the rest of her sandwich and pushes a few strands of damp hair from her forehead before removing the robe to reveal a navy blue swimsuit. 

“There's trunks in the cupboard with the towels. His size, but you can do something, I imagine.” Without looking at him, she climbs into the pool and sinks down onto a ledge by the sandwiches. 

Taako crosses the room and rummages through the cupboard before finding a pair of Magnus’s trunks to borrow. He’s  _ so  _ excited to see Magnus. So much so that he doesn’t really mind if she joins today. They hadn’t spoken much at all since her visit to the kitchen, save for the graduation itself, and it was hard to be in a foul mood in Raven’s Roost these days, anyway. 

He holds up Magnus’s plain swimsuit, the same navy blue as Lucretia’s, and frowns. For all the time spent trying to get Magnus to develop some style, none of it ever stuck. With a quick spell, he transmutes the large pair of trunks into a sleek pair of boardshorts, just his size. He looks at them and squints, then transmutes them once again to change the pattern to something a bit more  _ Taako.  _ Licks of flame not unlike the ones that had decorated his treasured surfboard years ago trail up the seams.

Taako steps onto the stairs of the small pool, water up to his ankles. “I don’t know who to blame for the tacky-ass shorts: you or Mango? I thought you had better sense than  _ that.”  _

She looks up at him. “Ah, your old board. Always loved that design. To be honest, he usually doesn't even wear any.”

Taako snorts, then laughs. “Right, natch. Forgot who we were talking about for a sec.”

“There's a couple of pair of really dreadful…. You remember the shorts he wore to Refuge? He'd wear those if I didn't —” She shakes her head ruefully. “I just got a few pairs of these to keep here just in case, something that doesn't make my eyes bleed when I look at them.”

“Oh  _ gods,  _ not those fucking abominations,” Taako moans. “He asks me if I’m buying a  _ kilt,  _ meanwhile he’s got those things on? Jesus.” 

“I wish you could’ve been a better influence,” she says wryly. 

Taako glides into the pool, gliding into the seat across from Lucretia with a rush of water. “You think I didn’t try?” He shakes his head, the ghost of his laugh still lingering. “He does what he wants. Doesn’t matter how many times I tell him ‘those shorts are ugly as sin,’ or, ‘hey, don’t eat that rock,’ or whatever dumb shit he tries to do next.” 

She sighs, staring off into the distance. “Yeah, he'll eat pretty much anything,” she says, her voice soft. 

He slips his arm out of the water and uses prestidigitation to wick his hand dry. Lucretia holds out the plate and he takes another sandwich. 

“The big lug,” he sighs. “You’d think a century would be enough time to learn that lesson, but…” 

The familiar weight of melancholy settles over her shoulders. She finishes off her sandwich and slips under the surface. The cool water buoys her, rinsing the sweat from her scalp. She resurfaces with water dripping from her cropped curls. 

“They both thought I should get one, him and Merle, you know, good for the knees and all that,” she says, setting back into her spot. 

“Fountain of youth was bound to run out at some point, right? Now we gotta learn how to get old and shit.” Taako shifts. The water does feel nice; it relieves the dull ache in his back and side. Being crushed by a washing machine hadn’t been his favorite way to flirt with death. 

For a moment she considers the hundreds of years he probably still has in front of him and the loss of twenty from her own lifespan, but she doesn't mention either, just mutters, “It would have been nice to get used to it the normal way.” 

Taako pauses, looks away, realizes what he’s said. “Uh, shit. Yeah. That’s…” 

He thinks of Magnus growing ten years older before his eyes. How it’d itched at him, the realization that time is sacred, especially to humans. He thinks of the girl he’d met over a century ago, fresh-faced and too nervous to look at him straight. He meets her eyes now, feeling a little stupid for bringing it up at all. 

“It sucks,” he says, looking away again. 

“Almost certainly my own fault,” she says. “Damn thing was so obviously a trap, it should've just said that in big sparkly letters.” She waves a hand dramatically, then in a poor parody of the Fantasy Costco theme sings, “Wonderland Elves, we'll kill all your dreams for you.” She kicks under the water aimlessly. “What are you going to do, though?” 

Taako can’t help but laugh. “That’s not — A for effort on the song, though.” He sighs to himself, wondering if she’s being dismissive for his sake or her own. “To be fair, I think they had better taste than sparkly letters. Maybe some tasteful neon?” 

She scoffs and reaches for another sandwich. “Do you not remember that invitation? If anything, sparkles  _ and _ neon. Hell of an aesthetic, though.” That itself had been one of the trials of Wonderland: a matched pair of glittering elves, like a carnival mirror of the friends she’d lost and pushed away? They couldn't have devised a worse torture if they'd tried. 

“Fair enough. I guess if you  _ have  _ to feed off eternal suffering to sustain your incorporeal lich bod, might as well do it in style.” 

She looks away abruptly to keep from showing tears as she sees Lup on the Day in her mind’s eye, gorgeous and perfect: against all odds, still alive, still grounded. A thing too much to have hoped for. But she knows better than to speak that name and destroy this tentative peace. 

“True,” is all she can say. 

Taako notices her shifting, avoiding his eyes under the heavy silence. He settles against the wall and kicks his legs to stir the water around him a bit, making a quiet rumble under the water. “They should really have drinks in here,” he says, sounding a little more faint than he wants to. “A good mojito right now? Mmm.” 

“That's easy enough. I splurged for the model with the bar,” she says, grateful for the out. A Mage Hand floats over with a towel from the cupboard and she climbs out, dries her hands and her hair, then wraps the towel around her waist. “Two mojitos coming up.” She takes down a pair of tall glasses and some bottles, then walks over to a wall of little plants: mostly ferns, but with a few pots of mint, basil, lemongrass, and rosemary tucked amongst them. She looks over at him, still kicking in the pool. “I’m surprised you didn’t get that one.” 

He thinks back to buying the spa at Fantasy Costco, after arriving back at the moonbase from the train station in Neverwinter. “Was strapped for cash, at the time. That was what I, uh,” Taako feels the tips of his ears flush. “sold off Ango’s silverware for, actually. Couldn’t spring for the luxury package.” 

She pauses with her hand over the mint. Strange, the little things that give her these pangs of … guilt, maybe? Disappointment in herself, certainly. Paying them, like they were — like they weren’t her oldest friends? She shakes her head, pinches a couple of sprigs of mint. “Could probably get an upgrade now if you wanted,” she says as she pours rum and simple syrup over the mint. “There’s some, uh, nice features of this model. I imagine you guys would really enjoy it.” She cuts and squeezes the limes. “And I think the cucumber sandwiches are better, anyway. More refreshing.” 

“To each their own. They could use a little more white pepper, in my humble opinion.” Taako says as she walks towards him with the two drinks in hand. He reaches for the one with the extra lime. “I guess I could stand an upgrade. Still feel kinda bad about that one.” He shakes his head, sips his drink. It’s perfect. “Even if Django says it’s water under the bridge.”

He hesitates, unsure  _ why  _ he’s even speaking. He squeezes the lime into his drink and drops it into the glass, poking at it with his straw. 

She pauses at a panel of lights. “Whirlpool mode sound good to you?”

He kicks back and drapes an arm on the ledge of the pool. “Taako’s favorite.”

“He’s a generous young man. I think he understands.” A smile plays across her face for just a moment. “Besides, I think he already worked something out with Garfield. Some sort of side deal? I’ve only caught a hint of it; he’s being  _ very _ cagey.” She climbs back in, sips her drink, and leans back with a sigh. “I actually offered to help buy the rest of the set back, once, and he said not to bother.” 

“Angus? Cagey? No…” Taako says with heavy sarcasm. He smirks and exhales through his nose. “But yeah. He’s a good kid.”

She takes a deep breath, sips the mojito again, fiddles with the garnish. “He is, isn’t he? Thank you for….” She thinks of the morning she came into the cafeteria, the giant letters burned into the wall. “Thank you for getting him started with magic? For...um…. For taking an interest in him? I know he was just an annoying kid….” She rubs her face and mumbles into her hand, “who I recruited?” 

He shrugs. “He’s talented. A natural, I guess. He get that from you or his dad?” 

Any other time, he probably would have meant it as an insult, but this time it’s flat, neutral as it can be. He considers the little things Angus does and says that remind him of Lucretia or Magnus, especially those first years when they’d really been as young as Angus is now. It seems so far away now, memories untouched for years until Angus chuckled like Lucretia, or grinned exactly as Magnus does and those memories come rushing back. He sips his drink.

She chuckles. “Who spent a hundred years with six arcanists and never learned anything stronger than a cantrip? I don’t think he got it from his father.” She takes another drink, watching Taako over the rim of her glass. She wishes she could impress on him exactly how much his tutelage has meant to Angus, despite the silverware, despite the teasing. But it’s entirely likely that he won’t hear it, not from her. “Anyway, thank you.” 

“Maggie’s pretty dece at whatever he puts his mind to, though,” Taako says thoughtfully. He flashes a grin. “I think he got that much. That and being yoked in their late teens. Jeezy.” 

“A certain...ah...persistence.” Her sly smile is more subtle, but it flashes much the same. “Can’t believe he’s so  _ tall _ . It’s hardly fair.” 

“Goddamn beanstalk.” Taako shakes his head. “He got all that good stuff from Magnus.” 

“Tree trunk, more like.” She sighs. “I did tell him once that he’s got to get some new detective techniques, though; that big-eyed innocence thing doesn’t work so well coming from a giant.” Then she snorts. “Might work out like it does for his father, I suppose. Hard to say no to that look.” She finishes her drink with a flourish. “That was refreshing. Another?” 

“Want me to make ‘em?” Taako stands, stretches in the water. 

She hands him her glass.

He climbs out of the pool and walks to the bar. “He’ll do alright. It’s not like anything was conventional for us. Can’t expect it to be for him either, really.” 

He’s not really sure if that’s something good or something unfortunate. 

“Mojito, or...?” he asks, instead of thinking too much about it. 

She looks up at the softly lit draperies of the spa’s roof. Thinking about Angus’s future, about how they all fit into this world that was never theirs, it’s exhausting. “Surprise me,” she says.

He ducks behind the bar, clucks his tongue as he browses the cabinet to get creative. There’s some part of him that  _ wants  _ to talk about Angus, or about their unconventional life, but he’d just rather not. But it prods at him, insistent, as he pulls an elegant-looking bottle of vodka from the cabinet and sets it on the counter. “I do feel bad that he got dragged into the middle of all our….” He gestures vaguely. “Bullshit.” 

“That might be an understatement.” There isn’t anything else handy for her to fidget with, so she picks up another sandwich. “I’m sure you will be unsurprised to hear that I’ve apologized to him. He just....” She takes a bite, chews slowly. “‘ _ Mom, you know I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for your dumb bullshit. _ ’ Ugh. Thanks, kid. Magnus’s optimism plus my persistence? That’s too much for anyone to deal with, really.” 

Taako feels a sudden rush of emotion, and he’s not sure why. He’s glad she’s not facing him. “That’s what I mean, he’s got — he’s good. I’ve been through it, out there, not a lot of family to fall back on…” his voice tapers off as he considers himself, wondering if he’s talking about his childhood with Lup, or the years apart from her. He pours a generous amount of vodka into the shaker in front of him. “To be…  _ good  _ after that, it’s… yeah. Magnus, I guess.” 

“Yeah. Magnus.” She sinks into the water up to her chin. “They’re good,” she says flatly. “They should have had each other...sooner.” Her mouth is set in a tight line, but her hands are trembling. She’s tried talking to both of them about it, but they’re both always full of reassurances. It’s kind, but not always satisfying. 

His hand tightens as he transmutes cranberry juice to grapefruit; he has to force himself to focus on the spell, not get distracted by — he’s not  _ angry,  _ not quite. But there’s something that’s been lingering behind the envy, the anger, that had simmered beneath, and sometimes bubbled over,  their interactions in the past. He sets the bottle down and exhales. “I mean, yeah, they should have.” 

He adds orange bitters, then pops a bottle of Prosecco with a mage hand. She’s quiet.

“Being without your parents that young, that’s…” He trails off and caps the shaker, filling the silence with the rattling of ice cubes. “I wish he’d never had to feel that way. ‘Cause it sucks, not knowing  _ why.”  _ He thinks about Lup, feels helpless for all the time they’d spent not belonging. “But bullshit’s bullshit, I guess. Don’t get to choose your family.” 

He pours half the shaker’s contents into one glass. 

This time, when she closes her eyes, she sees herself walking Merle out to the beach, where she thought he’d find a family; leaving Magnus in Ravens Roost, where he  _ did _ find a family; handing the bundled infant Angus to old man McDonald. She tried to choose families for them all, and look where that got them.

And Taako…. When she took his sister, she tried to give him the world. 

Now her chin is under the water. She slips even further down and blows bubbles across the top of the water in a long tired exhale. 

“McDonald, he was…. That was…. I thought it was….” She closes her eyes. “Angus always tells me how good he was, loved him like he was his own.” She takes a long breath, swallows hard, speaks before she can stop herself. “Taako, I’m sorry about Lup.” 

His blood runs ice cold. He sets the shaker down with a loud  _ clink _ on the marble. 

“That’s — that’s not what I was getting at.” 

He stares at the two cups in front of him, one empty and one full, and glances up at Lucretia, still facing away from him in the pool. He is frozen in place, hands balled tight on the counter, tips of his ears burning. He doesn’t want to go back, to dredge up the past just as he’s learned to look away from it. 

She grips her hands together under the water, fighting the urge to disappear under the water until he leaves, yet also biting her tongue to keep back stammered apologies. There was a status quo between them, something new, she’s sure of it, and now she’s absolutely convinced it’s about to collapse by her own error. 

But as usual, it's too late now. No way out but through.

She pulls herself up again and turns to look at him. She wants some clue about how to proceed from here, but she can’t see his face, and his posture holds her at arm’s length. 

“I know. I know you didn't mean it that way. But I know it  _ is  _ that way. We both know….” 

“Yeah, you  _ know,”  _ he scoffs. The memory comes over him, a flicker at first that catches fire and spreads through his whole body until he’s at its mercy. The past becomes a wall of flame before him: Lup and the Starblaster and Fisher and the silverware and home and Forsake and Magnus and L-U-P burned into the wall and Lup, back soon, and  _ Lup, _ exploding from the staff in a spectacle of red smoke and fire. He closes his eyes and his thoughts slow. He considers just leaving, but something keeps him frozen there, burning, looking down at his fists. “What do you  _ know?”  _

“I know I went too far,” she says softly. “And in his home of all places? I know you’ve suffered enough already, and I can’t take any of it back, and I should have stopped talking about ten minutes ago.” She takes a deep breath. “That’s it, for now, I think,” she says, attempting a self-deprecating tone. She doesn’t say she’s sorry; that would be too much, perhaps the last straw. 

“I didn’t— I just—” He puts a shaky palm, still pruny from the water, onto his forehead. “Lucretia, why would…” He shakes his head, too heavy to finish his thought. He chides himself for thinking this could have gone any way but south. “You’re  _ sorry  _ about Lup, but you don’t even know why.” 

He gathers himself enough to pour the other drink, trying to swallow the fraying knot in his throat. He doesn’t bother with the garnish, just picks the glass up and takes a long sip. He thinks about her guilt, how he feels it running as an undercurrent in their every interaction, how he’s not even sure if she feels it for his sake or for her own. 

“I don’t care if you feel like shit about it,” he says. He can’t stop his anger, drawing its sword when inside he wavers. “You should. No number of heart-to-hearts will fix that one, so I don’t know why you had to…” 

“I’m an idiot, that’s why,” she says, annoyed with herself, frustrated with him. “I didn’t think I could fix it, the gods themselves know I could never fix it. But I thought I could say — I thought you could hear me? I thought we —“ She doesn’t let herself say it, barely lets herself feel it, that tiny upwelling of hope crushed again. She shakes her head, dips under the water for just a moment. It’s quiet there, and the old impulse to forget and disappear rears its head. But again: it’s too late for that. She surfaces, runs her hands through her wet hair; she’s not quite ready to leave the safety of the water. 

“But we — we keep choosing Forsake,” she murmurs, as much to herself as to Taako. She sees him as if on the other side of the screen in Wonderland, those nameless others, doomed by her remorseless choices.

“Yeah, well, you know. Sometimes, what’s on the other side of that wall….” He swallows hard, trying to avoid a minefield of tears. Lup is still alight in every inch of his mind. “Everyone has something to say about it. About her.” He sets his glass down, throat stinging of alcohol. “I’m sick of thinking about it, never mind talking about it. And never mind talking about it with  _ you. _ ” He straightens himself, looks in her direction but doesn’t meet her eyes. “She probably would’ve chosen Trust, huh?” 

He watches Lucretia shift slightly in the water, then meets her gaze. 

“Like Merle,” she says. “Like Magnus.”

Tears prick the corners of his eyes. 

“Makes me wonder what I would have done in there if my brain hadn’t been Swiss cheese,” he says quietly. “But then again, they were just as fucked as I was, and they still…” 

She climbs out of the pool, dripping onto the tiled floor.

“I don't even have that excuse,” she says as she towels off. She taps the side of her head with one finger. “I went in with everything, all my memories, and I chose Forsake over and over, and I couldn’t even….” Her shrug is light, but her face is drawn. She hadn’t gotten the bell, only lost everything else. “Not the only time I should have trusted and didn't.” 

She stands a little distance away, not yet confident enough to approach him.

“You said I didn't know what I was sorry _for_. Most of the time I suppose that's true. But I know that I took away….” She takes a deep breath, seeing her own hand pressing that button, her hand letting Lup’s name dissolve. “Trust. And I think that is the worst thing I could have done.” 

He recoils a bit at her words. “So much more than that, but yeah. That’s the idea…” He thinks about the rush of shame he’d felt seeing Antonia after Wonderland’s fall. It’d been the same feeling that had cowered behind his elation as Lup burst from her umbrella in all her resplendence; embarrassment for what he’d done, and who he’d become, without her. He wants to curl into himself at the thought, like muscle memory triggered by even the suggestion of this pain. “Trust or Forsake, but at least they gave us the choice.”  

She winces, twisting the towel in her hands. She thinks about leaving Cam: she'd hoped, when she escaped, that somehow he would make it through. It still weighs on her. 

“I chose Forsake for all of us, and it was the wrong choice. And not even mine to make.”

He thinks of Lup. He can only think of Lup. 

“I said before that I'm not asking — you don't have to forgive me. I still mean it. I think I  _ still  _ don't understand why the others did.” She's standing still in the open area between pool and bar. “I just — I just said it, and that was probably a mistake. You were talking about — about family and Angus and it just —” 

Taako squeezes his eyes shut tight and looks at the ground. “I wish, for once,” he mutters, nails burning half-moons into his palms, “you wouldn’t make all this — Lup, forgiveness, what you did to _us —_ about _you_.” 

She pinches the bridge of her nose, and it's not the small gesture of frustration that it usually is. She looks as if she might shove a thumb entirely into her eye socket. Her jaw works for a second, pulsing. 

“What the fuck. I'm not trying to make this about me. I'm — sweet lady Istus, why do I think I can ever open my mouth? Without making it….” She huffs out a breath, shaking her head. “Should have set a damn alarm, apparently.” 

He twists himself tighter, still, feeling the coil of anger in the pit of his stomach. Keeping it bottled inside feels impossible, and so he doesn’t. 

“ _Stop!_ ” He struggles to draw a steady breath. “You do it, everyone does it. Everyone, _everyone_ makes it about themselves when it should be about _my sister,_ and I’m fucking sick of listening to everyone else talk about it!”

“Well, then you talk for once!”

He stills. Looks away. 

“I know you're furious but all I get from you is snide comments and avoidance and we still don't talk. And I thought that something had happened the other day. That maybe it was different. Maybe there was a way forward? You said you understood. And I —” It catches in her throat, the fury and the loss and the frustration. She's shaking with it. She takes a breath, takes one more hesitant step in his direction. 

“Well, maybe I can’t. Maybe there  _ isn’t.”  _ He wipes his face. Sobs once into his palm. He wants there to be. He thinks there might be. But he can’t bring himself to be anything but cruel as the same old storm brews within him. “I want  _ you  _ to understand, but you can’t, because I don’t even know what to say. It sucked.” He throws his arms out, defeated, and lets them fall to his sides. “Found out I really am a terrible person without my sister. And she—” 

It levels him, how much it hurts. He can hardly bear it as he stands there helplessly in the humid air. 

“She was everything, and then she was nothing, and I... that makes me....” 

“That's horseshit,” she says in a hard flat tone. She sounds a lot like Angus. “Dammit, Taako, you're not a terrible person.”

“I ran from Glamour Springs, I chose Forsake, I stole a kid’s fucking  _ silverware,”  _ he says, welling up, voice growing thick. He swallows. “I forgot her. How could I forget her?” 

Everything she thought to say as she walked toward him dies on her tongue. 

“I did that,” she says softly. “That was me.” She sits on a chaise lounge and puts her head in her hands. 

The tears come now, inevitably, and he hates himself for it. “That’s not something I should be able to forget. That— those years— it was the worst—” he falters, stammering to a stop, realizing he doesn’t have the language to speak of it. Hearing himself even beginning to give voice to those feelings petrifies him.

She's staring off into the distance and she begins to speak softly, distantly. “There's a whole, a whole world of people who forgot…. Forgot their families, their lovers, forgot how they died, how they lived…. It shouldn't have been possible. And….” She closes her eyes. “Now they celebrate. And sometimes I wonder how they could possibly….  _ I did that. _ ” She looks at her hands, her scarred forearms. Considers again the things she did with her own hands, the things she had others do. Considers Brian. Bane. Boyland. Maureen. Worse, people whose names she'll never know. “What I meant to do doesn't matter. What I  _ did  _ do….”

She laughs humorlessly. “Stealing a child's silverware? That's just being an asshole. Even Glamour Springs — you were scared. What I did with Fisher, though, that was….” She sighs. “But now I'm just talking about myself again.” 

He wants to answer her, but he’s strangled. He takes a shuddering breath. “They should hate me for that shit, Lup and Mango,” he says quietly. He leaves his drink behind on the bar and sits at the edge of the pool, floating his legs in the water. “And you too, for… all that you did. But they don’t. And I can’t — I try to understand, but I can’t.” 

He wipes the back of his hand over his eyes, trying to clear tears away.

“And yeah, like you said, I don’t have to  _ be them.  _ And neither do you, I guess. But that’s not enough.” 

“What  _ would _ be enough?” she asks. “We're not them, and this…. This I think we can both agree is bad. What else is there, for you and I?” 

He looks at his feet in the water. He considers everything he wants to say, the jumble of everything he  _ could _ say but can’t figure out how to. 

“I don’t know. I never got that far,” he says faintly. 

She wants to go sit beside him and put her arm around him. She wants to know what it's like for him. She's afraid to know, afraid it’s as unforgivable as she thinks it might be. She wants to ask if he's even talked to Lup. She's terrified to say her name again in his presence. 

She stands stiffly from the chaise. All of the afternoon’s mellowness is gone.

There's two drinks on the bar, though, and one of them is full. She takes a sip. It's very strong, but cold, and the flavors are perfectly balanced. And instantly familiar. 

_ She’s on the deck and the world below them is small and beautiful and probably doomed. Lup hands her a glass and it’s cold and bright and bitter and sparkling. “You made it strong, didn’t you?” A wink. “Oh, maybe. You know me, babe.” And her heart, it skips a beat. _

“Tessaralia,” is what she says out loud. “She…. We used to drink these, later.” Her heart is in her throat, still wondering if everything she’s saying is a mistake. She sips slowly. It’s not actually as strong as when Lup used to make them, but it’s strong enough. She tries to sit with the silence, but she can’t help herself. “Have you — have you talked to her about it?” 

He feels something inside him tense, snap, and unravel all at once. As tears fall, he looks down at the water. Ripples distort his reflection.

“No. I can’t. I don’t know _how_ —” He shuts his eyes and tries to will himself calm. “She doesn’t need this. She’s… she’s happy.” 

With the exact force that it took to get up every morning and be Madame Director, she pushes herself away from the bar and over to the pool. She sits at the edge, drink in her hands, close enough that she can see him out of the corner of her eye, not so close as to startle him.

“Maybe. Maybe she needs….” She sighs. It can’t possibly be true, but she doesn’t doubt him, either. “It’s not my place….” That familiar rush of — what, bitterness? Less now than it used to be, at least, but this isn’t about her. “I think maybe you should. I think she’d...want that.” She lifts the drink to her lips with hands trembling from nerves. 

“I don’t know how,” he repeats, voice watery and thin. “I don’t know how to talk about it. Every time I try to talk about how I feel, someone tells me I’m wrong. You roll your eyes, Magnus hugs it out, Kravitz gets all Fantasy Romeo about it.” A few tears drip from his hanging head and into the pool. “It hurts. I wish it could just  _ hurt  _ without everyone else feeling like they have to make up for it.”

He kicks at the water, splashing, distracting himself, and sniffs. 

“Lup will do the same thing. She’ll tell me I’m good, she’ll say one day it won’t hurt so much. But I don’t — I don’t give a fuck about  _ one day.  _ Everyone else looks forward and I can’t stop looking…” He hesitates, discomforted by her gaze beside him. “Looking back, I guess.” 

She hums softly. “Sometimes it’s nice to hug it out,” she says, looking down at her toes. “But don’t...don’t underestimate Lup. She — we —” She feels worse, somehow, realizing for the first time that maybe she’s talked to Lup about what happened more than Taako has. The wrongness of it makes her skin crawl. She opens and closes her mouth several times, uncertain how to even start. “You can trust her. With all of it.” 

He draws a long breath, then lets it out. “It’s not Lup I’m worried about.” He rubs a hand over his tired face. “I — she — I trust her. Fuckin’ obviously. But we’re…” He stops and closes his mouth. He stares at his reflection for a long, quiet moment, the water of the pool lapping against the wall. “We’re different now. And it’s because…” 

He wants to blame her, but he doesn’t, because he knows it’s not entirely true. 

“I can’t stop thinking the person I would be, if I never forgot her. Apocalypse aside and whatever… I’d be better.” He shakes his head. “I’m a better person when I’m with her. But I don’t think she’s better when she’s with me.” 

Lucretia remembers a cycle — one of very few — when Taako died and Lup lived. A village burned to the ground, not quite black glass, but close. An angry cloud over the ship, slammed doors, dares taken too far, chances taken that shouldn’t have been. Davenport had taken the rare step of confining her to quarters for a week. Lucretia had winced every time she’d heard boots in the hall, because encountering Lup that cycle meant you’d be likely to get your head bitten off over approximately nothing.

No one had said anything about it, the next time around. She realizes that no one had ever said anything at all.

“I wouldn’t say that,” is all she says. 

He winces. Tightens his grip on the stony edge of the pool. Being angry about Angus, about Magnus, about their life that could have been, that had been easy. Quickfire, sharp rage. But this… being angry about what had been done, what pain it had brought, what couldn’t be now, because of it… it’s all-encompassing. 

He wonders who he’d be without Lucretia. If he’d be better or worse. He glances over at her and sees her staring somewhere else. She’s so much older now than she had been back then. Magnus is getting older too; he thinks about it more than he wants to. 

“I want to be better than I am, Luce.” He scrunches up his face, then relaxes, drawing new breath. “I want there to be a way out. But it — I —“ 

His heart hammers as he’s heading east from Glamour Springs; in a neon room, choosing Forsake; in a dorm room, hand clamped over his mouth, wondering how to fill the cavernous emptiness that dwells in him no matter where he goes. Pointing the staff at Lucretia’s throat and resisting the demanding thrum of his heart to just  _ do it already,  _ because Magnus is standing beside him. 

“Everything about it still fucking hurts.” 

She drinks in lieu of an answer while she thinks. Alone, too much time alone. The empty ship on the plane of the judges, talking to Fisher and the bare walls to keep from going entirely mad. Alone in her room, feeding pages to a dark and sparkling tank. Fleeing through the Felicity Wilds, abruptly aged and broken. Alone on her dais — why had she insisted on a  _ dais _ , when Maureen said perhaps it was a bit much? Locked in her own bubble, staff and sword trained on her, turned on her. And they’d found each other, but she’d still been so alone.

“It does.”

He’s silent and still, save for the slow movement of tears dripping down to his chin. He closes his eyes, opens his mouth, tries to gather the courage to say it in a way that’s not vicious or vindictive or dominated by blind rage. 

“What you did…” he says, so quiet he’s not sure she’ll even hear him. Perhaps for the best. He can’t find a voice inside him that’s strong enough to say it. 

She glances at him. He feels her looking and hastily wipes tears away. She almost wishes she could cry but she feels frozen.

“Yes.” She wants to say that she knows, but maybe she doesn’t know. Maybe she’s never known. “I wish I’d been better than I was.” The glass is almost empty, and she feels just a little light-headed. 

_ It hurts.  _ He wants to tell her. He wants to say it in a way that could encompass all of his pain. But he can’t. So it just throbs, like an aching, open wound.  _ It hurts. It hurts.  _

He thinks of her in his kitchen. His head on her shoulder. The drawings he’d kept. The small piece of himself that kept tugging him forward, hoping that someday he might be able to put his grief, shouldered for years now, down at her feet. 

He has no white flag to offer. And understanding itself hadn’t been enough. He feels exhausted. Embarrassed, defeated again, stupid for trying. 

“You hurt me and you don’t get it. You can’t.” He shudders out a breath. “You had to. And I… I understand. But I need _you_ to understand, and you can’t, and I don’t _know_.” He’s exasperated with the feeling, and with himself. “I don’t know. I don’t—“ 

Something cracks in her all at once. She couldn’t cry, she couldn’t, and now she is, without warning or preface.

“I didn’t have to. I didn’t. I want to understand and I try, I keep trying, and you’re right, I can’t. He tells me I’m a good person and I look at — it’s just a lie. It can’t possibly be — I  _ hurt you _ . Why? I didn’t, I shouldn’t have — and there it is. Done.” She feels like her hands belong to someone else as they tighten around the glass, and she knows she should set it down, but she doesn’t. She swallows, tries to stop the tears, but they just won’t. She seethes with fury at herself. An inch less self-control, and she’d have thrown the glass across the room to hear it smash against something. And then hated her own self-indulgence, probably. She sags forward, staring down into the water. 

Everything she’s said spins around in his head. All he can focus on are the random scraps of memory that weave in and out of his grasp, some so sweet that they sting, some so poisonous that they burn on sight. He settles in his pain, watching her cry.

“You came, one of those years. To see Sizzle it Up.” 

She nods, not trusting her voice.

“And you— you saw how I was, then.”

Now she sets the glass on the edge of the pool, rubs her face, and tries to take a breath but it just comes out raw and ragged. She nods again. It had been bad, so bad. She closes her eyes and she can see the whole thing, hear how  _ different _ he was.

“You….” She doesn’t know what to say. Maybe there isn’t anything she  _ can _ say. 

He thinks of those years, good at first, slowly bleeding into manic days and potions and pinhole pupils and sleepless nights, wondering why the empty space in his bed felt like a static headache beside him. 

“How could you not  _ do  _ something?”

“Oh. Oh god.” She puts her head in her hands. “Oh dear god.” She can’t breathe. “I don’t  _ know _ . I thought — what was I thinking?” No tears now, instead her whole body distant and numb. She’s felt guilty before, but now it hits her twice as hard, except that she can’t actually feel anything at all. Or at least, she shouldn’t — she doesn’t have the right to feel anything. She finds herself, for the first time in years, wishing for the comfort of her old staff. 

He wants to bolt. He wants to walk out of the spa and call Kravitz and be whisked home where he won’t have to talk about it anymore. Every time he’s alone with her, he falls apart. This time may actually drive that lesson home. 

If it’d been anyone else, anyone better than him, they’d pull her into a hug and let her cry. But he can’t, and he doesn’t. That vindictive piece of him that so often dominates, the blind rage, it wins out this time. He wants her to hurt like he hurt. He wants her to understand, and this only seems fair.

He wants to feel satisfied when he looks up at her. But as she hunches forward on herself, eyes wide and uncrying as she stares into the water, he just feels miserable. 

Without looking at him, almost without thinking, she slips back into the pool and swims across, skimming the bottom. When she touches the far end, she surfaces, hugging the edge. She turns back to look at him again, his hard angry expression. It feels worse, worse than seeing him at that show, worse than being threatened on the Day, worse than anything in years.

“I wish,” she says, in a voice barely audible above the bubbling whirlpool, “I wish I could make you forget just me, forget  _ those _ years, and then you could go on and get better, I think.” She wants to leave, but she doesn’t know how and doesn’t know where she would go. Hide on the moon, again, most likely. 

He shuts his eyes and swallows, finding his throat dry and tight. He imagines it for a moment, wanting to stretch out and relish the space where what she did no longer defines him. But the places she’s supposed to be fills with static, stinging and grating on his memory. A blur on the other side of Magnus’s bed. A roar of white noise where her laugh is supposed to ring clear. Forgotten blueprints for an empty house. A wall full of drawings and ribbons and notes, half of it gone to smoke and smudge. 

“I don’t—” he tries to start, but no sound comes from his mouth. He swallows again, takes a shaky breath in. He can hardly believe he’s saying it, after all the times he wished he  _ would _ forget. “I don’t want that. That won’t fix it.” 

He opens his eyes and looks at her and sees it on her face, that she’d give all those sacred moments for him to heal. 

“Then it can’t be fixed.” She stares, not at the water, not at him, not at the bar or the door to the sauna or the chaise lounges, just at nothing at all. “It’s fine, it’s not like I have that power at my disposal anymore anyway.” There’s a twitch of her mouth like a parody of a smile. “At least I finally get it, right?” She looks at him with unblinking empty eyes. 

He thought it’d feel better than this, but it just feels wrong. He sees now, sees all the rotting sorrow within her that she’d meticulously buried beneath the facade of Madam Director. Sees how the pain she caused him had drained the joy from her, too. 

“There were good parts, before…” He trails his fingers over the surface of the water. “Things I remember, that I  _ want  _ to remember.” Melancholy washes over him as she looks away. He hesitates as the warm air settles between them. “Maybe it’s not about  _ fixing  _ it, Creesh.” 

“What is it, then?” The feeling gradually returns as she forces herself to breathe, to take in the details around her. To really look at him, her old friend, sitting sad and tired on the other side of a pool. She asks him again, “What would be enough?” 

He thinks of Magnus’s big heart, Lup’s infinite understanding, and wonders what they would do. He clenches his jaw. He’s not Magnus. He’s not Lup. He can’t be, he won’t be, and he can’t keep trying. And this… 

He looks at Lucretia, broken and beaten down by years of this. And there’s a foreign pang of guilt inside him, knowing some of it is his fault. He knows he can’t keep doing this. If not for her sake, then for his own. 

“It’s not gonna get fixed.” He thinks about the endless tangle of his life before him, complicated by memory and anger and love and grief and family, and feels unbearably exhausted by it all. But there are good things. Old things. New things. Kravitz’s hands spreading over his in the pastry nook. Magnus and Angus sitting on the patio, their laughter drifting in through the window. “It doesn’t mean we can’t try… try to…” 

He doesn’t know how to say it. He has no white flag to offer. 

But she’s there, in the water, and she’s crying, and for the first time in a long time, he feels he has even a little power to ease this pain. 

“We can try to make something new.” 

Tears stream down her already wet face. She doesn't remember starting to cry again. Something new. She remembers pinning a brooch on Killian’s suit on her wedding day.  _ Thanks for everything, boss.  _ Candlenights, with Mavis and Mookie looking down through the window in the floor, Taako stealing a kiss from Kravitz under the mistletoe. Gripping Magnus’s hand so hard as they watched Angus speak at his graduation, and Taako holding Magnus’s other hand just as tight. She nods, blinks, wipes her face. 

“Yes. We can try.”

She pushes off across the pool back towards him. She stops short, somewhere in the middle, hovering, unsure. Again she runs trembling wet hands through her wet hair. 

“I would like to try.” 

Taako nods and looks away, moving to stand up, uncomfortable under her exhausted gaze. He walks to the bar and listens to the splashing behind him as she climbs out of the pool. It’s quiet, save for the sound of the water and her sniffling as she towels off. Taako takes two martini glasses and transmutes them into two mugs: one that says “World’s Best Dads” (a mug from home, a silly gift from Angus that he’d never admit he was fond of), and another that declares in looping script, “Moon’s Best Director” (a silly gift from Magnus that he knows she is fond of). 

As he pours juice into the mugs, he transmutes it to tea, steaming and near perfectly brewed. He’s done it many times before, mostly for Kravitz’s Earl Grey when he can’t be bothered to boil water, but it’s always hard to get right from only magic. She’s a purist when it comes to her tea, but this will have to do. This, or two more mojitos. And he doesn’t think that’d serve them very well. 

She looks lost when he turns to her with the mugs in hand. She’s wrapped herself in her robe, hugging her chest for warmth.

“Sit,” he nods to the chaise beside her. She does, and he hands her the mug. 

“Thank you,” she says, finally, voice a bit creaky. “And not just for the tea. I was a little, ah, gone in there.” 

He doesn’t say anything. He’s not sure what he can say. He sits down on the chaise opposite her, clutching his mug tight, unable to shake the sight of her in the pool. 

She’s afraid to say anything more, so she blows on the tea, although it's not really too hot. It is, honestly, more of a sigh of relief, or possibly a cover for her embarrassment. 

He wants to pretend like it didn’t happen, but it did. As he looks at her, slumped over with her mug raised to her lips and her eyes distant and tired, the pang of guilt inside him comes again, sharper this time than before. 

“You, uh…” He looks down at the amber liquid steaming in his mug. “Spooked me there for a minute. I just…” He sucks in a breath, looks at the pool. “What I said, that’s something that…” 

“I guess I still….” Rather than trying to articulate that thought any further, she sips the tea. “Oh!” It’s not rose, it’s not oolong. It’s...something else. Black tea? And spices, she can’t quite name them all, along with a touch of orange. “This is...nice?” she says. “Different.” She clasps her hands tighter around the warm mug and breathes it in. “Have I...have we had this before?” 

He shrugs. “Dunno. You haven’t had every variety of Taako Brand tea?” He smirks to himself and sips. “Cinnamon orange, for the record. My own go-to.”

“But you always make….” She thinks back over all the years. Drinking oolong with Magnus and Taako on the Starblaster, or rose tea late at night when Magnus wasn’t around. The familiar feeling, in his kitchen, of drinking rose tea with him again. She’s never had  _ this _ tea, though, she’s sure of it. Tears well up in her eyes again.

She holds the mug a bit away from her, traces out the lettering with her fingertips. Such a silly gift, one that had delighted her beyond all reason. She wouldn't have thought Taako would have noticed it in the jumble in the cupboards of Magnus’s kitchen. 

“You drink what we drink,” she says softly, before taking another sip. 

He shrugs, flushing pink from his cheeks to his ears. He glances at the doorway, the light curtains drifting. It’s dark outside. “Easier to just make two of the same, eh?” 

“You don’t always have to, you know. It’s been long enough….” She takes a deep breath. The scent of the tea fills the air around them. She wishes...a great many things. “I trust you.” 

His chest tightens, his gaze still trained on the door. He feels so much at once — relief, sorrow, anger, nostalgia, shame — that his throat closes on any words he could have offered. Tears prick his eyes and force him to blink. He sees her shift in his peripheral and he grasps at words that just won’t come.

He sees her in her office, pleading, asking why they don’t trust her. In Wonderland, choosing Forsake just like he did. On the Starblaster, begging them to just trust her plan; he hadn’t even heard her, hadn’t  _ bothered  _ to. 

And he sees her on the deck beside him, in the middle of the night, waiting for Magnus to come back from a run. Trusting him enough to lay her head down to sleep on his shoulder. To tell him he’s a good friend. 

There’s so much inside of him, raw and ugly and tangled. And he doesn’t know how to even begin to move through it all. He only feels shame now, beating steady beneath his skin until it crawls. He looks away, looks down, looks at the tea and holds it tight in one hand. He looks up at her and there she is: just as worn down and broken as he is. With his empty hand, he touches her knee. 

He’s sorry. And this time, he’s ready to be. 

His hand tightens, then relaxes. He inhales through his nose. 

“Lucy,” he says quietly, testing his voice. Seeing if he can say her name without breaking, the name they called her on their brightest days. “I’m… I’m sorry. For what it’s worth.” 

Her exhalation of breath is so soft that he can’t tell if she’s saying “oh” or “no”. She puts a hand over his hand.

Then: “Taako.” Some days, all she can see is the day she set him in that wagon, the wrong choice, over and over the wrong choice. But she lifts her head and she looks at him, and it’s not that.  _ There’s always a third option. _ It’s the tiny lilt of optimism, coming back from the brink of oblivion. He’s squeezing her knee, and she hadn’t realized how  _ much _ she’d missed that comfort, a friend’s comfort. “Really?” She grips his hand. “Why?” It comes out plaintive, even more lost than before. 

He laughs a little, feeling weak. “Try to do one right thing and ya just get put on the spot, huh?” He resists the urge to withdraw his hand. 

“Okay, fine, pretend I didn’t ask,” she says, laughing faintly.

A faint smile ghosts over his lips before leaving his expression lifeless. “No, I just…” No words feel right. He’s not even sure why he’s sorry, really, he just knows that he  _ is.  _ “I don’t know. I just feel bad. I just… I don’t know.”

He sucks in a breath, sets his jaw. 

“I upset you. I mean, I have a track record with that, but…” He knows this time is different. “This can’t be all there is. ‘Cause that fucking sucks.”

“Indeed.” She chuckles, it’s a little rough, but almost herself. 

He looks down at his bare feet on the ground, wet footprints between them, and thinks about all there is. All the old, and all the new. He thinks about Angus, and Magnus, and Kravitz, and Lup. About how his plans for a life with his best friends had been dashed, but replaced with this life. A life unimaginably  _ good _ . 

He wonders where he fits in among all that good. He wonders if he deserves it at all. 

“I want to be better.”

It’s silent, save for the hum of the whirlpool jets beneath the water. Melancholy settles in the small space between them.  

“That is quite a mood.” She raises an eyebrow. “Funny, isn't it, being a brand or a…whatever…and everyone thinks they know. And it looks…so together. It's just…not, really. And on the other hand….” She smiles a bit wistfully as she looks at the mug of tea, at his hand still on her knee. “It can be pretty good, if we let it.” 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Taako’s  _ always  _ so together.” He pulls away and stretches back with a laugh, trying to distract the focus from himself. “I’m, uh… I’m trying to let it.” 

He takes his mug into both hands, the tea not quite warm enough anymore, and takes a long sip. He traces a fingertip over the word  _ DADS  _ in big block letters. 

“That’s all you can do, right?” 

“I suppose.” She takes another sip. Her knee still feels warm. “I appreciate…. Thank you for trying.” She feels her heart in her throat. “Friend?” 

The word seizes up inside him, but he doesn’t flinch. He holds his mug fast, takes a breath, reminds himself of the good. 

He wonders if she could fit in, unimaginably, among all the good, too. 

“Yeah, Creesh. Something like that.” 

The breath she takes then is easy, easier than she can remember in years. His words may sound ambivalent, but she can see hope there. Her heart settles back to its normal location. She takes another breath, and another. She glances at the fluttering curtains, the dark yard beyond. 

“He's probably back by now,” she says. “If you wanted to….” 

Exhaustion washes over him all at once as he thinks about all the questions Magnus is bound to ask. But still, fondness. Excitement to see the man he’s loved for as long as he can remember. “Probably should, huh? Big lug’s probably been in there this whole time, knowing him.”

“Quite possibly.” She takes a deep breath and squares her shoulders. Then, unexpectedly, a smile. “We might as well go face the music together, yes?” 

“Well, I hope he’s not singing, ‘cause that won’t be fun for anybody,” he jokes, setting his tea down, standing, stretching his arms above his head. And then, a smile, too. “C’mon.” 

She stands as well, tilting her head and popping her neck before heading for the exit. 

“Don't forget your things; I'm taking the spa with me.” 

He walks around the pool and gathers his discarded outfit. On his way to the door, he pauses to take one more cucumber sandwich. 

“Want one?” 

“Don't mind if I do.” She takes the last sandwich, sets down the mug, then holds open the curtain for him. 

Once he's left, she lets it fall and steps out onto the back lawn. A command word, and the spa is once again small enough to fit in her hands. She looks up to the back door. Taako's walking up the stairs, and the doorway beyond is a rectangle of light filled with a familiar shadow.

“Hey Taak, you  _ are _ here!” Magnus’s voice echoes across the yard as he throws his arms wide. 

“In the flesh, baby,” Taako laughs, then yelps as Magnus hoists him into a hug. 

“ _ And  _ Luce?” he says as he sets Taako down, keeping an arm around his shoulder. Lucretia nods as she walks up the steps. 

“That would be me, yes.”

“Coooool.” He grins, an infectious expression, and then they're both smiling as well. A wave of dogs comes out onto the porch, barking and circling until they calm at the sound of his voice. Lucretia and Taako exchange a look. Such fondness. Such  _ goodness _ . Regardless of time and the past and memory, forgetting and remembering again: here he is, here they are. 

“Let's go in,” he says, warmly, easily. And they do. 


End file.
